Month: April 2015

One week to the day after the most popular Geocaching website in the world imposed a one year moratoriam on new challenge caches, we at OpenCaching North America our introducing our own! As the banner says, they are Locationless, so to speak. If you qualify, you can log it. They are owned by a special Admin account, OCNAChallenges, and are all Unknown (?) type caches. They are presented as Geo Art in the Gulf of Mexico. We plan on having 40+, but we are just releasing the first 12 today, Tuesday, April 28th, 2015.

Unfortunately, not the greatest of news. HikerJamz and CrazyCritter1966 have decided to discontinue their Geocaching Podcast in favor of their Nature Talk Podcast. James told us, “There are a few obstacles that we can’t overcome and our final decision has been to discontinue the show of geocaching. For one we have to travel so far now to find the caches now, two, it’s rattlesnake season and three, we don’t get any feed back from anyone. We put out a lot of effort to find cachers to contact us with just some short adventure stories and nothing comes back to us. Tina and I have done 23 episodes (5 months) worth of podcast’s and we feel that nobody wants to participate”.

Additionally, James went on to tell us that listenership numbers were not what they were hoping for. Fortunately, however, the numbers for Nature Talk were almost up to the levels of the Geocaching podcast after only 3 episodes! We and James have mutually agreed that the Nature Talk Podcast isn’t about Geocaching, and we will not be posting it to this blog. We wish James and CrazyCritter all the best with the Nature Talk Podcast. Be sure to check it out, Episode 4 will be released on April 29th, 2015, the day after this blog post. You can check out all the Nature Talk shows on Spreaker at Aftercache.com, as well as iTunes, soundcloud, blogspot, tumblr, and stitcher.

At the approximate midpoint of the pedestrian walkway on this railroad bridge over the Potomac River is the starting point of the Appalachian Trail (hereafter referred to as the AT), in Maryland. That’s the historic town of Harpers Ferry, West Virginia across the river, which just happens to be the location of Appalachian Trail Conservancy HQ. The AT in Maryland follows a 40.9 mile route, mostly along the backbone of South Mountain. The AT Conservancy rates the Maryland section of the trail with an overall difficulty of 2 out of 10, (which is quite easy by AT standards), and the elevation ranges from 230 to 1,880 feet. We assume, that as outdoorsy types, most Geocachers are familiar The AT, especially those in the Eastern half of The U.S. and Canada. But we’ll give a quick overview of the whole trail before discussing the Maryland section. And Geocaching, of course.

No regular blog post this week. But we have not one, not two, but three (relatively) new HikerJamz shows for you! As you may have heard, HikerJamz and CrazyCritter1966 started a 2nd podcast, Nature Talk. The original HikerJamz After-Cache show has been renamed PhotoCaching. However, HikerJamz’s channel on Spreaker.com is still called After-Cache. So the plan here at the OCNA blog is to embed both shows into a post on Wednesdays or Thursdays. HikerJamz and CrazyCritter plan on releasing PhotoCaching shows on Sunday, and Nature Talk shows on Wednesdays. Of course that’s not set in stone, Podcasters get busy and miss their target deadlines on occasion.

So we have Nature Talk episode 1 (released 4/9/15), Nature Talk episode 2 (released 4/15/15), and PhotoCaching episode 40 (released 4/12/15) embedded below for your listening pleasure. On Episode 2 of Nature Talk, they have Nature Girl on the show, who is a former Veterinary Technician with 23 years of service. Next week hopefully they will have author Greg Ganos, his first published book called “Greg’s Backyard Birdies”, who is at a book signing this week.

Above is the National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial. We could consider this post part of our “Things to do near Geowoodstock XIII” series, as Arlington, Virginia (which sits directly across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C.), is 61 miles from Boonsboro, according to Mapquest. We would expect many Geocachers to combine a trip to Washington, D.C, and the surrounding area with their trip to GW. On our website, we have have 5 virtual caches within a .9 mile radius of a point centered in Arlington National Cemetery, and they are all excellent. They are:

They are NOT, however, the only OCNA caches in Arlington; they are merely the 5 featured virtual caches within a .9 mile radius. You could spend a whole day finding OCNA caches in Arlington; we have 13 of them (the first 13 in that search), including another Virtual and a Webcam. Read on for more info on the 5 featured Virts.

There was no HikerJamz After-Cache show recorded this past weekend. This is because he and CrazyCritter 1966 are working on getting a 2nd podcast set up. Without further adieu, here is a statement from them copied and pasted:

Tina (Crazycritter1966) and I (Hikerjamz) have been putting together another idea to go along with our podcast. We set up a facebook page called Tina Potts (nature talk) as her favorite hobby is photography while geocaching. We are now setting up a podcast of the same theme and planning on running it in the mid-week of our AfterCache show. We will call the geocaching show (PhotoCaching) and the mid-week show will be called (NatureTalk). Both podcast can be heard from aftercache.com and hope we can reach many listeners on the new show as we did on the regular show. A lot of geocachers have some sort of camera with them while they are out caching and this will be a great opportunity to let them share their photography and stories with others. Everyone is welcome to send a friend request, visit or just post on the FaceBook page if they like. We only have a hand full of friends there right now, but plan on big numbers soon! Nature Talk podcast will run like PhotoCaching between 30-45 minutes and possibly on a Wednesday. We hope that everyone who reads this will check out both podcast’s. We will resume our regularly scheduled shows next weekend 4/12/15. Thanks to all who already listen to us and have a great week.